It has become commonplace for people carry a multitude of personal portable devices capable of interacting in a personal wireless network (e.g., cell phones, PDAs, PIMs, MP3 players, PNDs, digital cameras, wireless headsets, wireless earpieces, wireless microphones, etc.) that they employ in combination to carry out a task where each device is assigned a portion of that task. Such tasks include listening to music, watching a video, engaging in a telephone conversation, reading emails, exchanging text messages, entering data, editing data, printing data, etc. Such personal portable devices are meant to be easily movable from place to place by being easily carried on the persons of their users in some way (e.g., in a pocket, strapped to an arm or wrist, worn over the head, suspended from a neck strap or shoulder strap, clipped to a belt or lapel, etc.).
It has also become commonplace for people to obtain different personal portable devices from different vendors employing different generations of various technologies and to rely on widely-accepted standards of wireless communications to enable their different personal portable devices to interact. As those skilled in the art will readily recognize, technologies in the areas of audio and visual communications are quickly evolving and accepted standards in the encoding, transmission and encryption of audio/visual data are also quickly evolving. As a result, it is not uncommon for a user to acquire different personal portable devices capable of overlapping audio/visual functions, but each implementing those functions in a manner that adheres to different generations of a standard or each implementing those functions in a manner that adheres to competing standards.
By way of example, depending on the choice of media by which a user receives a piece of audio/visual data, the audio may be encoded in Dolby Digital, Dolby Surround, MLP, Dolby DTS, Audio MPEG, MP3, WMA, or any of a variety of other encoding formats. To be so easily carried on a user's person, the physical size and weight of such devices is usually kept to a minimum, which necessarily restricts choices of electronic components within such devices to those that are physically smaller in size, that consume electrical power at a lesser rate, and that dissipate a lesser proportion of electrical energy as heat. Such restrictions often require various compromises in design choices, such as a physically smaller battery, a slower processor, a lesser data storage capacity, and input/output components accommodating a slower maximum rate of data throughput.
As a result, such personal portable devices are often limited in the complexity of the tasks and/or portions of tasks that they are able to perform. Complex tasks often require the execution of larger sequences of instructions of larger routines at faster rates and/or the storage and processing of larger quantities of data. This often necessitates a greater memory storage capacity, a larger rate of electric power consumption, a greater amount of heat dissipation and/or a higher rate of data throughput than can be accommodated by at least some personal portable devices in which one or more of the above compromises in design choices have been made.